Altarrin is back about nine candlemarks after he left. It's midmorning now. He hasn't really slept, beyond a twenty-minute nap he managed to snatch on a pallet on the floor in the safety of his cache, before waking with a start.
(Working in a position of visible and acknowledged power within the Empire isn't good for him. He's known that for a while. The systems and precautions he built - the culture, the society, that he built up around them, over centuries - are enough to keep out the most egregious of the gods he now knows are his and perhaps the whole world's most dangerous enemy, but whenever he isn't personally there to keep pushing, the place starts eating itself. And so he's here, trying to build an oasis of trust while the people around him fight vicious, pointless, wasteful games, and it's exhausting and it leaves him feeling like none of the structures around him will really bear weight...)
He takes stimulants instead, and Gates back to an obscure shielded Work Room, just in case someone did notice his absence and managed to get past the mages loyal to him in order to booby-trap his office or plan an assassination. He doesn't think it's likely, but this is how paranoid he needs to be, to avoid the risk that one in a thousand or one in ten thousand times -
There are no reports of problems in the infirmary; the woman has been peacefully asleep, though the Healers are grumbling about the rotation required to keep her that way. The Emperor wants an update. Altarrin gives one, to the best of his ability; it can't be very satisfying.